Yesterday one of the plates on my bicycle chain came loose on the ride to work, and instead of soft pedaling home I opted to take public transportation. It’d been a while since I had taken the T home from work, and so I was a little rusty when it came to things like rushing down to the platform to stand outside an empty train, only to find out five minutes later, that another train, on another platform would be taking me into the city, but not before it sat dumbly on the track for five to ten minutes.
I spent the time getting my grumpy on, dwelling on my nearly broken bicycle chain, the fact that I haven’t been running lately, all the crap I have to get done, yadda yadda yadda. Meanwhile, some dopey kid with a Razor scooter and his pal get on the train. He wasn’t really a kid, so much as a young adult, and the scooter wasn’t so much a mode of transportation but a badge proclaiming him a free spirit. So, the kid then, is looking around the train all self righteous, and lecturing his pal with this smug sense of bravado.
Though a non-believer at heart I sent a small prayer up asking for the train to jerk forward and send him reeling from his scooter. Unfortunately, if there was a conversion experience on the redline yesterday it didn’t involve me.
Then the kid is pointing out to his friend that everybody on the T sits a seat apart from everybody else. “It’s like they’re afraid of one another,” and as if to illustrate how silly this is, and to suggest maybe that everybody should sit as close as humanly possible to one another, he plops himself between to people who wanted absolutely nothing to do with him.
I was very tempted to say to nobody in particular, “oh look, Holden Caulfield is on the train today,” but I didn’t for any number of reasons, some of which I will go over now, so that you can get a better look at how exactly I think.
1. For the most party I am personally very averse to confrontation of all kinds.
2. I wasn’t sure that anybody else on the train would get it.
3. I wasn’t sure I would really get it either since, truth be told, I have never really read Catcher in the Rye.
4. I didn’t feel like the price paid for combatting his ridiculousness (i.e. me suddenly becoming the old crank) was worth it.
5. I knew that I could seek passive-aggresive refuge in my blog and compain about him there.